Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  13 Stalin’s row with Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, outraged Lenin’s bourgeois sentiments. But Stalin thought it was entirely consistent with Party culture: “Why should I stand on my hind legs for her? To sleep with Lenin does not mean you understand Marxism-Leninism. Just because she used the same toilet as Lenin...” This led to some classic Stalin jokes, in which he warned Krupskaya that if she did not obey, the Central Committee would appoint someone else as Lenin’s wife. That is a very Bolshevik concept. His disrespect for Krupskaya was probably not helped by her complaints about Lenin’s flirtations with his assistants, including Yelena Stasova, the one whom Stalin threatened to promote to “wife.”

  14 Of course Kaganovich kept the moustache which remained fashionable. Even facial hair was then based on the leader cult: if a client wanted a goatee with beard and moustache, he would ask his barber for a “Kalinin” after the Politburo member. When Stalin ordered another leader, Bulganin, to chop off his beard, he compromised by keeping a “Kalinin” goatee.

  15 Stalin followed the same principle with his clothes: he refused to replace his meagre wardrobe of two or three much-darned tunics, old trousers and his favourite greatcoat and cap from the Civil War. He was not alone in this sartorial asceticism but he was aware that, like Frederick the Great whom he had studied, his deliberately modest old clothes only accentuated his natural authority. As for his boots, the cobbler’s son always took care to cultivate his martial air: he commissioned a special pair in Tsaritsyn in 1918 and later had them made in soft leather. When he got corns, he cut holes in the leather.

  16 Yet their self-conscious brutality coexisted with a rigid code of Party manners: Bolsheviks were meant to behave to one another like bourgeois gentlemen. Divorces were “frowned upon more severely than in the Catholic Church.” When Kaganovich wrote on the death sentence of

  17 His revealing thoughts on the kulaks on his scraps of paper include: “kulaks—deserters” then, even more suggestively: “villages and slaves.” One peasant revealed how kulaks were selected: “Just between the three of us, the poor peasants of the village get together in a meeting and decide: “So and so had six horses . . .” They notify the GPU and there you are: So-and-so gets five years.” Only novelists and poets are really capable of catching the brutish alienation of the villages: Andrei Platonov’s novel The Foundation Pit is the finest of these.

  18 At the Bolshoi, Kozlovsky suddenly lost his voice during Rigoletto. The singer peered helplessly up towards Stalin’s Box A, pointing at his throat. Quick as a flash, Stalin silently pointed at the left side of his tunic near the pocket where medals are pinned and painted a medal. Kozlovsky’s voice returned. He got the medal.

  19 Kirov, his Leningrad boss, lived in a huge apartment containing a dazzling array of the latest equipment. First there was a huge new American fridge—a General Electric—of which only ten were imported into the USSR. American gramophones were specially prized: there was a “radiola” on which Kirov could listen to the Mariinsky Ballet in his apartment; there was a “petiphone,” a wind-up gramophone without a speaker, and one with a speaker, plus a lamp radio. When the first television reached Moscow just before the war, the Mikoyans received the alien object that reflected the picture in a glass that stuck out at forty-five degrees. As for Budyonny, Stalin wrote: “I gave you the sword but it’s not a very beautiful one so I decided to send you a better one inscribed—it’s on its way!”

  20 For example, Kamenev’s wife was Trotsky’s sister; Yagoda was married into the Sverdlov family; Poskrebyshev, Stalin’s secretary, was married to the sister of Trotsky’s daughter-in-law. Two top Stalinists, Shcherbakov and Zhdanov, were brothers-in-law. Later the children of the Politburo would intermarry.

  21 In Sholokhov’s novel Virgin Soil Upturned, the Cossacks call off their revolt when they read it. But they also withdraw from the collective farm.

  22 “You know Marapultsa,” Voroshilov wrote to Stalin in October 1930. “He was condemned for five years . . . I think you agree with me that he was condemned rightly.” On another occasion, Voroshilov appealed to Stalin for a “semi-lunatic” he had known since 1911 who was in jail. “What do I want you to do? Almost nothing . . . but for you to consider for one minute the destruction of Minin and decide what to do with him . . .”

  23 They frequently disagreed with him, certainly on small matters such as a discussion about the Kremlin military school: “Seems that after the objections of Comrade Kalinin and others (I know other Politburo members object too), we can forgive them because it’s not an important question,” Stalin wrote to Voroshilov. Having defeated Bukharin in 1929, Stalin wanted to appoint him Education Commissar but as Voroshilov told Sergo in a letter, “Because we were a united majority, we pushed it through (against Koba).”

  24 Doing nothing and lacking “vigilance” was an equally sacred sin in Stalin’s eyes: he called it “thoughtlessness.”

  25 Nechist means an unclean devil in peasant folklore.

  26 Lenin himself had governed as Premier (Chairman of Sovnarkom) from 1917 to 1924. On his death, his natural successor, Kamenev, had not succeeded to the post partly because he was a Jew not a Russian. Hence Rykov got the job.

  27 Stalin proudly advertised this to the novelist Maxim Gorky in Italy: “He’s a brave, clever, quite modern leader—his real name is Scriabin.” (Did Stalin, always an intellectual snob, add the “Scriabin” to impress Gorky with Molotov’s false association with the composer to whom he was not related?)

  28 Throughout his career, he would keep the crown jewels, as it were, the Soviet gold reserve or the number of tanks in his reserve at the Battle of Moscow in 1941, scribbled in his personal notebook. He took a special interest in gold production, which was mostly by forced labour.

  29 The Red Army’s Inspector of Cavalry, Semyon Budyonny, born on the Cossack Don, was a former sergeant in the Tsarist Dragoons, decorated during WWI with the St. George Cavalryman’s ribbon, the highest distinction available. He served first the Tsar, then the Revolution, and then Stalin personally for the rest of his life, distinguishing himself at Tsaritsyn in Voroshilov’s Tenth Army and rising to worldwide fame as commander of the First Cavalry Army. When Babel published his Red Cavalry stories, telling of the cruelty, lyricism and machismo of the Cossacks, and Budyonny’s taciturn ruthlessness (and “dazzling teeth”), the furious commander tried unsuccessfully to suppress them. Never rising to the Politburo, he remained one of Stalin’s intimates until the war and, though always devoted to cavalry, studied hard to modernize his military knowledge.

  30 Stalin’s ex-secretary, now Editorial Director of Pravda, Lev Mekhlis, actually kept a “Bolshevik diary” for his newborn son, Leonid, in which he confided the crazy fanatical faith in Communism for which he was creating “this man of the future, this New Man.” On 2 January 1923, the proud father records how he has placed Lenin’s portrait “with a red ribbon” in the pram: “The baby often looks at the portrait.” He was training the baby “for the struggle.”

  31 Kirov, for example, had not seen his sisters for twenty years when he was assassinated and indeed he had not even bothered to tell them who or where he was. They only discovered when they read it in the papers that the famous Kirov was their brother Kostrikov.

  32 These long holidays were formally proposed by his colleagues so the decrees in the archives often read: “At the proposal of Ordzhonikidze” or “To approve the proposition of Comrades Molotov, Kaganovich, Kalinin to grant Comrade Stalin twenty days holiday.”

  33 Mukhalatka was the favourite resort of Molotov and Mikoyan, though both also holidayed in orbit around Stalin at Sochi. It remained a Soviet favourite: the resort is close to Foros where Gorbachev was arrested during the 1991 coup d’état. Naturally, being Bolsheviks, the leaders were always sacking the local officials at these resorts: “Belinsky was rude . . . not for the first time,” Stalin wrote to Yagoda and Molotov. “He should be removed at once from control of Mukhalatka. Appoint someone of the Yagoda type or approved by Y
agoda.” If they did not find the holiday houses to their taste, they proposed new luxuries: “There’s no good hotel on the Black Sea for tourist and foreign specialists and working leaders,” wrote Kalinin to Voroshilov. “To hurry it up, we must give it to the GPU.”

  34 In the mid-thirties, Miron Merzhanov, Stalin’s architect, rebuilt the house in stone. The big, dark green house is still there: there is now a museum with a dummy of Stalin at his desk, a Café Stalin, and a mini-Stalin theme park in the gardens.

  35 But this has been a boon for historians: their main communication was by letter until 1935 when a safe telephone link was set up between Moscow and the south. Trotsky had paraphrased Herzen’s comment on Nicholas I, “Genghiz Khan with a telegraph,” to call Stalin “Genghiz Khan with a telephone.” Yet it is a sobering thought that for several months a year, he ruled with no telephone at all.

  36 The driver down south was named Nikolai Ivanovich Soloviev who was supposed to have been Nicholas II’s driver. In fact Soloviev had been General Brusilov’s chauffeur but had once, during the First World War, driven the Tsar.

  37 Beria was not the only future monster with whom Stalin concerned himself on this holiday. He also showed a special interest in Nikolai Yezhov, a young official who would be the secret police chief during the coming Terror: “They say that if Yezhov extends his holidays for a month or two, it’s not so bad. Let’s prolong his holiday . . . I’m voting ‘for.’ ” Yezhov was clearly a man to watch.

  38 Later, the old dictator would preside over drinking contests in which his guests would have to drink a cup of vodka for every degree they got wrong.

  39 Mikoyan was the Vicar of Bray of Soviet politics. “From Illich [Lenin] to Illich [Leonid Illich Brezhnev],” went the Russian saying, “without accident or stroke!” A veteran Soviet official described Mikoyan thus: “The rascal was able to walk through Red Square on a rainy day without an umbrella [and] without getting wet. He could dodge the raindrops.”

  40 Beal, the American, reported to the Chairman of Ukraine’s Central Executive Committee (the titular President), Petrovsky, who replied: “We know millions are dying. That is unfortunate but the glorious future of the Soviet Union will justify it.” By 1933, it is estimated that 1.1 million households, that is seven million people, lost their holdings and half of them were deported. As many as three million households were liquidated. At the start of this process in 1931, there were 13 million households collectivized out of roughly 25 million. By 1937, 18.5 million were collectivized but there were now only 19.9 million households: 5.7 million households, perhaps 15 million persons, had been deported, many of them dead.

  41 If anything, the Old Bolsheviks had a religious education: Stalin, Yenukidze and Mikoyan were seminarists, Voroshilov a choirboy; Kalinin attended church into his teens. Even Beria’s mother spent so much time at church, she actually died there. Kaganovich’s Jewish parents were frum: when they visited him in the Kremlin, his mother was not impressed— “But you’re all atheists!” she said.

  42 The Alliluyevs had only recently returned from Germany and they were shocked by the changes: “There were barriers and queues everywhere,” remembers Kira. “Everyone was hungry and scared. My mother was ashamed to wear the dresses she brought back. Everyone made fun of European fashions.”

  43 Margaret Thatcher used a similar expression about her favourite minister, Lord Young: “He brings me solutions: others bring me problems.” Every leader prizes such lieutenants.

  44 Stalin felt the “circle of friends,” tempered by the fight with the oppositions, was falling apart under the pressure of crisis and rows between Sergo and Molotov, as he confided in Kaganovich: Comrade Kuibyshev, already an alcoholic, “creates a bad impression. It seems he flees from work . . . Still worse is the conduct of Comrade Ordzhonikidze. The latter evidently does not take into account that his conduct (with sharpness against Comrades Molotov and Kuibyshev) leads to the undermining of our leading group.” Furthermore, Stalin was dissatisfied with Kosior and Rudzutak among others in the Politburo.

  45 Just as the grain fuelled the industrial engine, so did the peasants themselves. The same week, Stalin and Sergo, on holiday in Sochi, ordered Kaganovich and Molotov to transfer another 20,000 slave labourers, probably kulaks, to work on their new industrial city, Magnitogorsk. The repression was perhaps used deliberately to provide slave labour.

  46 None of the great writers, like Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Bulgakov or Babel, were there but Sholokhov, whom Stalin regarded as “a great artistic talent,” was present.

  47 “During the Congress I was busy with work,” he wrote to Gorky during 1930 in a friendly, confiding tone. “Now things are different and I can write. It’s not of course good, but now we have the opportunity to smooth out the fault. “No fault, no repentance, no repentance, no salvation.” They say you’re writing a play about the wreckers and you want new material. I’m gathering material and will send it to you . . . When are you coming to the USSR?” He treated Gorky almost as a member of the Soviet government, consulting him on Molotov’s promotion. If he was late in his replies, Stalin apologized for his “swinish” behaviour.

  48 Voroshilov, another Bolshevik seigneur, regularly sent Yagoda aristocratic gifts: “I received the horse,” Yagoda thanked Voroshilov in one note. “It’s not just a horse but a full-blooded thoroughbred. Warmest thanks. GY.” But he was also married to revolutionary royalty: Ida, his wife, was the niece of Sverdlov, the organizing genius and first Head of State. By coincidence, Gorky had adopted Ida’s uncle. Yagoda’s brother-in-law was Leopold Averbakh, a proletarian writer, who had been Chairman of RAPP, helping to lure Gorky back to Moscow and forming one of his circle when he arrived.

  49 The Forsyte Saga by Galsworthy and Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans were probably the most popular foreign works for the entire Politburo, who all seemed to be reading what they analysed as a damning indictment of a capitalist family, and of British imperialist repression in the Americas.

  50 Boris Pilniak, Russia’s most respected novelist until Gorky’s return, who had fallen into disfavour, wrote nervously to Stalin to ask if he could go abroad: “Esteemed Comrade Pilniak,” replied the leader (sarcastically, since he hated Pilniak for his short story “Tale of the Unextinguished Moon,” implying Stalin had arranged the medical murder of Defence Commissar Frunze in 1925), “Inquiries show the bodies of control are not opposed to your going abroad. They doubted it but now cease to doubt. So . . . your going abroad is decided. Good luck. Stalin.” Pilniak was executed on 21 April 1938.

  51 There were chairs hidden there for those of weak disposition to take a rest, and even better, there was a room behind with a bar for those who needed Dutch courage. The first Bolshevik Head of State, Yakov Sverdlov, died in 1919 after a freezing parade; the Politburo member Alexander Shcherbakov died after attending the 1945 victory parade; the Czech President Klement Gottwald died after enduring the icy hours of Stalin’s funeral on the Mausoleum.

  52 Maria “Marusya” Svanidze was to become a vital figure in Stalin’s entourage: her handwritten diary, which is one of the most revealing documents of the thirties, was preserved by Stalin in his own archive.

  53 Budyonny had lost his first wife in a possible suicide, perhaps when she discovered his relationship with his future second wife, the singer Olga. Ironically the other Soviet leader whose wife had committed suicide was the brilliant commander most hated by Stalin—Mikhail Tukhachevsky.

  54 It was therefore entirely appropriate that the Mariinsky should be renamed the Kirov after his death.

  55 Faked car crashes, often with fatal effects, were to become a bizarre feature of Stalin’s rule.

  56 President Putin still rules from this building, the seat of power in Russia since Lenin. Putin’s Chief of Staff works in Stalin’s old office. Until 1930, Stalin kept his main office on the fifth floor of the grey granite edifice of the Central Committee building on Old Square, up the hill from the Kremlin, where he had been well
served by his successive secretaries, Lev Mekhlis, who went on to greater things, and Tovstukha, who died prematurely. It was here that Stalin planned his campaigns against Trotsky, Zinoviev and Bukharin. In 1930, Poskrebyshev and the Special Sector, the fulcrum of Stalin’s dictatorship, moved into the Yellow Palace (also known as the Sovnarkom or Council of Ministers building) where the Politburo met, Stalin worked— and now lived.

  57 Kuntsevo was, like most of his other residences, built by Merzhanov: Stalin constantly ordered renovations and, after the war, the second floor. After his death, the contents were packed up but under Brezhnev, these were reassembled by Stalin’s reunited staff. It remains today closed up under the aegis of the FSB security organ, but exactly as it was when Stalin lived, even down to his shaving brushes and gramophone.

  58 They saddled their son with the absurd Bolshevik name Johnreed in honour of the author of Ten Days That Shook the World.

  59 Belomor cigarettes now became one of the most popular brands, smoked by Stalin himself when his favourite Herzogovina Flor were not to hand. The Belomor Canal was one of the triumphs that were celebrated by writers and film-makers; Gorky, the novelist who had become a shameful apologist for the worst excesses of Bolshevism, edited a book, The Canal Named for Stalin, that amazingly praised the humanitarian aspects of Belomor.

  60 We are especially well informed on this holiday because not only do we have Stalin’s correspondence with Kaganovich, in charge in Moscow, but the GPU took photographs which they mounted in a special album for Stalin, and Lakoba, the host in Abkhazia, also kept notes: therefore we have both sound and vision.